New Samsung Galaxy Note update brings plenty of changes

If you own the Samsung Galaxy Note you may have noticed that a minor-looking update recently hit your smartphone/tablet hybrid, well today we have some useful information as to what changes this update brings thanks to a great article posted on The Unwired.net.

The update itself is 74MB in size and can be manually triggered by going into Settings, About Phone and then tapping “Check for Updates”, depending on your carrier’s data speeds you may want to connect to a WiFi hotspot beforehand to save time. The update procedure is straight forward and shouldn’t take too long, once installed you should notice quite a few subtle changes which come together to deliver a richer overall user experience.

Firstly when your Galaxy Note is locked you should see a message reading “Swipe screen to unlock” this never appeared before, when you do unlock the device it is far easier and requires less of a swipe as before this update the screen size meant that you had to swipe quite a long distance to unlock your Note.

One aspect of the Galaxy Note which has been somewhat overhauled is the virtual QWERTY keyboard, firstly as the screen size is huge Samsung has decided to add number buttons above the QWERTY keys, this enables you to input numbers far easier than before and despite the fact that there’s 10 new buttons to tap on it doesn’t look like it will hamper the ease of typing which the Galaxy Note delivers. Samsung has also added a setting which enables you to right or left-align the QWERTY keyboard and numpad, this makes it far easier to input words and numbers one-handed when using the Note in portrait mode as the majority of people’s thumbs can’t reach the opposite side of the smartphone’s large display – you can see the changes below.

Other changes worth mentioning include the fact that a torch widget is now built into the Galaxy Note and brightness settings aren’t universal, which means that you can adjust the brightness independantly for the web browser.

All in all we think the changes will be welcomed by most people, you can see more screenshots of the changes via the link in the first paragraph of this brief article, have we missed anything which you’ve noticed? Have encountered problems post update? Let us know in the comments section below…